


The Cry Goes Round: 'Psmith Loves!'

by innie



Category: Psmith - P. G. Wodehouse, WODEHOUSE P. G. - Works
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2019-12-15
Packaged: 2021-02-24 16:02:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21800614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/innie/pseuds/innie
Summary: It was a grim state of affairs when a man could not count on his confidential secretary and adviser to remain glued to his side with the strongest of adhesives.
Relationships: Mike Jackson/Rupert Psmith
Comments: 14
Kudos: 31
Collections: Yuletide Madness 2019





	The Cry Goes Round: 'Psmith Loves!'

**Author's Note:**

  * For [egelantier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/egelantier/gifts), [aurilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/gifts).



> Two recipients because I simply couldn't choose between your delightful letters.
> 
> Beta by the fantastic morbane, who took infinite pains over this little fic while also, you know, running Yuletide.

On a brisk, cold morning, the kind that made any indoor space, even an office full of uncaring minions, feel warmly comforting, Mike returned to his old stomping ground within the New Asiatic Bank: the Postage Department ably commanded by Mr. Rossiter. Once there, Mike found he had one more reason to appreciate the grip that Commerce exercised over the flower of the nation. For his visit — which was, in fact, to Psmith and which had no nobler aim than to induce his friend to spend as much of the hour as they could in the tea-room — put him in precisely the proper spot to greet the newest employee of that vast and bustling enterprise.

Mr. Rossiter himself had likewise emerged from the relative seclusion of his office, whether to present the new arrival with yet another bright morning face to gladden his eyes or to discuss the latest triumph of Manchester United, Mike could not be sure, but the effect was that when the tyro seemingly intent on becoming a Postage minion turned up — delivered by Jakes, the peppiest of the messenger lads — Mike found himself standing shoulder to shoulder with Mr. Rossiter and Psmith.

But with their resemblance to a Roman phalanx the new man did not concern himself, as he knew and liked two of them already. It was true that he had not looked to find friends in a place he thought would house only blandly diligent drones or strivers desperate for promotion who would act in such a manner that they were constantly courting the _Et tu, Brute_ riposte. "Hello!" he said, surprised relief coursing through his tone.

"Hullo, Adair!" Mike said, equally surprised, and offered his hand to the chap he counted as the second-best friend Sedleigh had given him.

"Comrade Adair," Psmith greeted, executing a sort of courtly little bow. "Comrade Rossiter," he said next, turning to his Mancunian friend, "let us not say that our time together was all for naught, though now we must part. Let us think of how the Brothers Turnbull might conduct themselves were they to be torn asunder by fiends who failed to respect the bonds of family and fraternity."

Jakes was enjoying himself, listening to Psmith "jaw on," as he delicately expressed it to the other messengers later on, but felt it imperative to interrupt the feast of reason before Psmith could tuck his napkin into his collar and really get stuck into the flow of soul. "Ol' Bick says Smith stays in Postage." That his underlings' disrespectful nickname for Mr. Bickersdyke had a rhyming acquaintance with a certain diabolical epithet was taken by all who used it to be proof that names sometimes do tell the whole story. Psmith, with his silent but potent emendation of his own surname, had felt the truth of that sentiment long before any such personage as the Bank Manager entered his orbit. On the cusp of making a trenchant remark, he fell silent upon observing the effect upon Comrade Rossiter that this Psmith-centred utterance had; it was pure pleasure, and he was not one to deprive another of his cherished company.

He did not remain silent for long. "Comrade Adair, I stand chastened and corrected; it seems that we are to labour side by side, our noses sharpened by one and the same grindstone. Together we will, under the benevolent guidance of our friend Comrade Rossiter" — here he gestured eloquently to the manager — "raise this Postage Department to heights undreamt of by any bank before this day. Labour shall be our watchword, and glory will crown our efforts."

"I'll stop by to take you to lunch," Mike cut in, recognising the glazed look in Adair's eye as the surest sign of one who was unused of late to Psmith's particular brand of eloquence. To the maker of this promise Adair smiled his thanks before turning his attention to Mr. Rossiter, who was disposed to like any chum of Psmith and Mike and within the space of a single conversation felt certain that this was a man to whom the vital workings of his department could safely be trusted.

*

Mike, gathering postprandial wool under Mr. Waller's kindly eye rather than attending to the sporadic business of the Cash Department, was considering what he might do for Adair. True, he had obliged Adair by enabling the Wrykyn match, but that was, when the brass tacks were got down to, more for Sedleigh — to which he owed quite a lot anyway, and about which he'd been rather an insufferable ass — than for Adair. Adair, good chap, had been as pleased as if he could conceive of no greater gift, but Mike felt he still, if he could manage, ought to do Adair one good turn indisputably for him.

At lunch, in the few pauses that Psmith's conversation left for matters such as respiration and consumption of the chop-house's offerings, Adair had looked so beastly lonely and lost. It was just how Mike had felt when he'd stumbled into London — and the horror of that Acacia Street bedsit — knowing he owed it to his family to make a cracking success of himself and despairing of how he might do so. Adair, he recalled, had no family at all and no one upon whom he could rely or even turn to for an evening's pleasant conversation. Psmith had rescued him, providing all of those things and more, and now he needed to extend that same hand of friendship to Adair. But how? He had not a spacious flat — whose sunny landlady seemed to ask nothing better than to cook for Psmith whatever he requested, unless it was to do their mending — or the need for a confidential secretary and adviser.

Less by instinct or genius, and more by happenstance, he hit upon the thing exactly. What Adair had not had was life in the bosom of a loud, boisterous, intensely congenial family where no one stood on ceremony and sport was the natural pastime of all. Though the new Jackson house was, naturally, smaller than the one where he'd grown up under the tutelage of Saunders, there was still room for Mike to bring a friend for the weekend.

He resolved to write to his mother that very night.

* * *

All was not well, on a bright April morning, at the flat in Clement's Inn. The breakfast table, accustomed to the weight of two hearty portions of eggs and bacon and the light chatter of two friends, one verbose and the other laconic, instead bore only a single rack of toast and a pot of tea and was clouded in a fug of cigarette smoke as the heretofore verbose party — Psmith of the Shropshire Psmiths — smoked in a moody silence.

It had been months since Comrade Adair joined the New Asiatic Bank, and though the newcomer was diligent and conscientious, Psmith found himself unable to appreciate how much his own load, never very onerous, was lightened by another pair of hands. For now each of Mike's visits to the Postage Department, once the catalyst for a satisfying tête-à-tête, was wrapped in uncertainty pertaining to which of his workers Comrade Rossiter would let skip off hand-in-hand with Mike to the tea room. Of late, Manchester's doings on the pitch requiring considerable in-depth analysis, Psmith had found himself obliged to linger with Comrade Rossiter, whose pleasure in airing each of his ideas was palpable, and therefore could not accompany Mike and Comrade Adair as they went off together to eat, drink, and be merry.

It was a grim state of affairs when a man could not count on his confidential secretary and adviser to remain glued to his side with the strongest of adhesives. At this very moment — as had been the case for a number of weekends in recent memory — Mike had hauled Comrade Adair off to Shropshire for a visit to the Jackson homestead. Smaller and more crowded than the last Jackson estate, as Psmith noted on his one and only visit, but every last Jackson had pitched in to make it feel as homey as could be; Psmith admired their enterprise whilst deploring its necessity.

Still, why Comrade Adair needed to breathe quite so much pure Shropshire air Psmith was at a loss to see, and found the questions mounting in his mind. Was Mike a man or a little busy bee, destined to improve each shining hour of Comrade Adair's life? How had Comrade Adair made such a wild success of his first weekend that the Jacksons _en masse_ clamoured so to have him back? He'd have liked to observe Comrade Adair's methods firsthand, only the acreage of the Jackson home had shrunk to the extent that fitting in two non-Jacksons would have been a severe pinch, and so he had to wave the bonny boys off at the station and wind his weary steps to a solitary home.

His toast and tea had both gone cold by the time he ceased his contemplation, but he consumed them anyway; they suited his mood.

* * *

The days at the New Asiatic Bank had achieved a peculiar dualism: they seemed to stay exactly the same while also managing to feel thrice as long as the hours they comprised. So Psmith opined, addressing his philosophical observations to Young Jakes, who was markedly inferior to Mike as an audience. Jakes had not Mike's gift of appreciating soliloquies, but instead was determined to have what he evidently regarded as his fair share of the conversation.

"Nah," Young Jakes rebutted smartly, "London's good fun. Music halls and all sorts, we got. You wouldn't be moaning about the world being weary and flat and stale if you'd get eight good hours of sleep and have yourself some fun after you're out from under Ol' Bick's eye."

It was true, Psmith reflected, that he was failing to click with Morpheus; this business with Mike's extended absences and attentions to another chum was keeping him awake of a night. During the week he found himself, like one of the swains of Keats's Madeline, making his tiptoe way to where Mike lay sleeping in the next room, just to be reassured that his friend was with him still. He could of course hear Mike's calm, unhurried respiration from his own bed in the cosy silence of the flat, but the sight of Mike, curled up and content, seemed to settle him, though nothing, evidently, could fortify him against the inevitable loss of Mike once the weekend came.

But Psmiths, he reminded himself, could rough it. If he was to have his confidential secretary and adviser with him only in a part-time capacity, he would make sure that time was entirely pleasurable. The bank's telephone went into heavy use as he used it to secure, nearly nightly, seats for the latest theatrical offerings, of which Young Jakes had spoken so stirringly. Conscious of being gracious, he always offered to amend the order from two seats to three, if Adair was of a mind to join them, but that young man had no allowance, was too proud to accept charity, and was saving his pennies for pleasures less ephemeral than could be found in the West End.

On the fateful day on which Psmith at last diagnosed himself and discerned the cause of his malaise, Mike and Adair had gone off to darken the door of the tea room and Psmith watched them go, determined to put in an order for that night. On their last outing, he had seen a marquee advertising a show called, intriguingly, _After the Show_ , for which he wished to purchase tickets, but unfortunately he had not foreseen with his usual acuity the comedy routine into which trying to place his order would land him. The man on the other end of the call played his part in the rigmarole with mounting impatience, only demonstrating the slightest bit of curiosity in a fellow man's plight when asking why Psmith wanted to introduce such a spectacle to his eyeballs when there was a nice new musical that would far better preserve the harmony of his soul.

"And what is that?" Psmith asked, thoroughly exasperated but clinging to the courtesy he'd learnt at his mother's knee. He did not let slip his suspicion that the voice belonged to some close relation of the playwright about to be lauded as the best thing this side of Shakespeare. He looked up and saw Mike — with the inevitable Adair at his side — heading toward him, making that questioning face he put on when trying to ascertain what amusement Psmith had laid out for their shared delectation.

" _It's Love_ ," squawked the voice from the telephone just as Mike smiled at him, and the effect of the two phenomena occurring simultaneously was shattering.

* * *

It was done, and all was well, Mike thought, satisfied. Well, _almost_ all was well; he shuddered once more at the thought of the dim and cheerless flat Adair was heading to now. Adair had not fetched up in Dulwich, but somewhere even worse, and Mike felt a pang that their joyous weekend should have to end thus. It didn't seem fair that Adair trudged off into a gloomy darkness whilst he got to go home to light and cheer and Psmith.

Not that Psmith had been notably hilarious of late. There was something of the pale and wan about his smiles in the last few weeks, and Mike was, frankly, at a loss to explain what could have happened to upset him. He had broached the subject in his clumsy way, awkward and agonising because there was a hurt that had not been shared, and Psmith had been good enough to intimate that all his family were well before closing the subject.

If it wasn't his family — that troupe of bustling sisters and the indefatigable Mr. Smith — then surely it had to be his friends who were the cause of his upset; Mike knew to a nicety how little the work of the New Asiatic Bank impressed itself upon Psmith's soul, and even his project of educating Mr. Bickersdyke seemed to have palled a little. And the only friend of Psmith's at whom Mike could point an accusing finger was . . . himself.

Mike picked up the pace. How had he hurt Psmith?

Anxious to make amends for whatever transgression he had unwittingly committed, he burst into the flat with a turn of speed most usually exercised outdoors. Psmith's head shot up from his book. "Psmith," he gasped, dropping his bag heedlessly and trying very hard to project that silent P with all his unspoken might, and then realised that he had, in the course of his journey home, worked out nothing else to say. Never a gifted extemporaneous speaker, in times of crisis Mike tended to mimic a clam that had taken Trappist vows.

Psmith rose from his chair, an action that Mike, whose eye for kinesis was as sharp as his tongue was silent, likened to an uncoiling, and stood calm and watchful, evidently waiting for Mike to say more than his name. After a long moment's pause, Psmith spoke. "You have touched the spot with an unerring finger. I am indeed Psmith." Another silence, in which Psmith, encased in sky-blue pyjamas, seemed only to grow in magnificence, "And you are Comrade Jackson."

If he was _Comrade_ still, he could not be the blitherer he thought himself. Though there arose in his mind the memory of Jellicoe, who had retained Psmith's affectionate title even after displaying judgement that would shame a small child.

Putting Jellicoe out of his mind, Mike considered. Mike pondered. Mike hit upon it: Psmith was likely just run down by the hot weather — which he, Mike, had celebrated by playing cricket with his family and Adair — and reacting poorly to being cooped up in a city all the time. A moment later, Mike found a flaw in his logic: Psmith didn't have to stay in London any more than he, Mike, did; his family would have been glad to see him at any weekend he chose to visit. That he had not — that he had, instead, availed himself of the city's bounty of entertainment that still won no smile from him — was proof that Psmith's situation was evidently far more mysterious than Mike had guessed.

"Psmith," he said once silence reigned again, aware that he was not putting his best foot forward.

"Comrade Jackson," Psmith responded with prompt courtesy, then made a gesture to indicate he would start fresh. "Mike."

"Mike," Mike echoed as if in a fever dream or perhaps as if he were an exceptionally dim parrot. " _Mike_?" It was nearly a cry of anguish. For Psmith to be severing those fraternal bonds was horrifying.

"Mike," Psmith said firmly. Even without his eye-glass, his eyes seemed peculiarly brilliant. "For there is but one Mike and I could, with little difficulty, name a number of Comrades Jackson."

That did not have the curiously flexible, rubbery logic Mike was accustomed to finding in Psmith's utterances. _Mike_ was rather a common name, and he was a rather common chap. Still, he tried to play along. "My family alone must count for nearly a dozen," he said, preparing to reel the names off. "Dad, Mum, Joe, Bob, Marjory — well, not for long. She'll be the second Comrade Adair come the autumn." The rapturous glow Psmith's face took on at this news was so unexpectedly bright that Mike thought that Psmith, in his secret soul, must be a fervent matchmaker. It was like Psmith to remember that Marjie was his favourite sister, and that Adair had shown sufficient virtue — and prowess on the pitch — to deserve her and her deep fielding.

Psmith took a step closer; given the length of his legs, that step had significant consequences. Mike stopped his recital and readied himself for Psmith's congratulatory embrace, but none was forthcoming. "So love is in the air!" Psmith mused.

"Love and a lot of bally singing in the bath," Mike said, unable to hold in that complaint a moment longer. Adair had rather a fine voice, but Marjie warbled in a way that only a mother could love, though Mike had caught their mother shaking her head in disbelief when the caterwauling commenced.

"Is it the singing itself you object to or the setting?" Psmith asked, with some of his old lightness of tone. Mike could make neither heads nor tails of this question. His befuddlement must have shown, for Psmith injected a note of gravity into his voice. "May I offer my congratulations? You are not losing a sister but gaining a brother." Psmith spread his hands wide, and again Mike anticipated an embrace that did not come.

"I know all that," Mike said, thoroughly exasperated by the many shifts in the conversation and his sudden inability to read Psmith's body language. "I wanted to ask what's got you — had you, I suppose, for it looks to be over and done with now — in this funk? I know I've not been around much on weekends, but John, Adair that is, couldn't very well turn up on his own and he was keen to see Marjory every chance he could get. But what happened? You haven't told me how you're progressing with Old Bick. You haven't asked me to make a long arm to fetch you —"

"As it happens," Psmith said, suiting the action to his words, "I have a long arm myself." He threw his arm round Mike's waist and drew him close. "And I use it to fetch what I need." Psmith's face was so near that Mike was going cross-eyed trying to gauge its expression. "What I love," Psmith said, and kissed him.

Every cell of Mike's body rebelled. Psmith was too . . . _Psmith_ to be throwing himself away on Mike, who was not even the greatest of the Jacksons. _Love!_ That had been the word Psmith had spoken, and it was the only word for what Mike had felt burning in his heart since Psmith's confession in the Sammy incident had made him feel like a sleepwalker missing the last step.

It could not be possible. Psmith had somehow seen through him, discerned his desires, and was being kind. Kindness, Mike reflected dazedly, had never felt so good. Psmith's clever fingers were winding through his hair, Psmith's cleverer mouth was warm and firm on his, and he'd dreamt of this moment.

For nights beyond number, he had imagined Psmith leaving his own bed to come to the next room and make himself at home in Mike's. Even in his dreams he had been unable to envision what deed could be so mighty that his accomplishment of it would earn him Psmith's love as a reward, and it seemed he would never know what had done the trick. What he did know was that Psmith kissed like the very devil and that he had never been so blazingly happy. Mike wound his arms round the tall sky-blue pillar he loved and kissed back.

All was very well, on a sultry June night — and all the nights following — at the flat in Clement's Inn.


End file.
